Raspberry PI kernel compilation

You can compile the kernel on the board itself, but because of the limited resources it will take a lot of time. Alternatively you can crosscompile the kernel on another machine running Linux, Windows or OS X.

Compiling on the Raspberry pi itself

TODO: write the rest of this section.

Cross compiling on a foreign machine

Ubuntu Linux

getting the compiler

On Ubuntu Oneiric getting the arm cross compiler can be as easy as:

sudo apt-get install gcc-4.6-arm-linux-gnueabi

(TODO: Is this the right one? More packages required? I did this a while ago! TODO: Other distributions?)

getting the sources

create a directory where you can work on the raspberry pi software. I called mine "raspberrypi". Then clone the git repository.

Gentoo Linux

getting the compiler

Build the cross toolchain:

crossdev -v -t arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi

This command will most certainly fail on your machine. What you have to do to make it work, is to adjust the cross tools versions with the "--b", "--g", "--k" and "--l" flags. For the exact usage refer to the crossdev manpage. A good starting point for figuring out the right versions are those which are stable for the arm architecture.

getting the sources

create a directory where you can work on the raspberry pi software. I called mine "raspberrypi". Then clone the git repository.